PAPERS ON PLAY-MAKING I The New Art of Writing Plays BY LOPE DE VEGA TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM T. BREWSTER WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BRANDER MATTHEWS Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University _in the City of New York_ MCMXIV COPYRIGHT 1914 BY DRAMATIC MUSEUM OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CONTENTS Introduction by Brander Matthews The New Art of Writing Plays by Lope de Vega Notes by B. M. INTRODUCTION By a significant coincidence the marvellous outflowering of the drama is simultaneous in Spanish literature and in English. Spain almost exhausted her immense resources in fitting out the invincible Armada; and England strained every nerve to compass the defeat of the dread fleet. Lope de Vega, the foremost of the Iberian playwrights, actually sailed as a soldier on the fatal voyage to the English channel; and it is dimly possible that Shakspere also saw service on blue water; the year of the running sea fight is one of those in his biography about which we have no information, and his use of sea-terms has been declared by an expert to be scientifically accurate. In this simultaneous development of the drama in England and in Spain at the moment when the energy of the two peoples was aroused to the utmost, we have a confirmation of Brunetière's theory that the foundation of our pleasure in the playhouse is the assertion of the human will. Shakspere came forward after the English drama had already developed a variety of forms; and he found the road broken for him by Marlowe and Kyd, by Lyly and Greene. At first he followed in their footsteps, however far beyond them he was to advance in the end. Lope de Vega, on the other hand, was a pioneer; he it was who blazed the new trails in which all the succeeding playwrights of Spain gladly trod. Shakspere seems to have cared little for invention, borrowing his plots anywhere and everywhere, and reserving his imagination for the interpretation of tales first told by others. Lope, on the other hand again, abounded rather in invention than in the interpreting imagination; he was wonderfully fecund and prolific, unsurpassed in productivity even by Defoe or Dumas. It was he who made the pattern that Calderon and all the rest were to employ. It was he who worked out the formula of the Spanish _comedia_, often not a comedy at all in our English understanding of the term, but rather a play of intrigue, peopled with hot-blooded heroes who wore their hearts on their sleeves and who carried their hands on the hilts of their swords.